Kathy Griffin Kicked the Right's Phony Outrage Machine into High Gear

A very stupid joke happened, and Drew Magary is certain that the Right will never let us hear the end of it.

In case you missed it yesterday, and I pray you did, comedian Kathy Griffin was photographed yesterday holding up an effigy of Donald Trump’s bloody severed head. Given that Griffin traffics in the same kind of desperate attention-seeking that the president has mastered, and given that she occupies the exact level of fame that Trump used to occupy—and should have occupied for the remainder of his existence—her little art stunt deserved to be ignored. Griffin already apologized for it, and something called Squatty Potty suspended her. CNN also "fired" her from the one night a year they give her freelance work. You’d think that would be the merciful end of it.

But that, of course, is not what happened. No no, you’re gonna be hearing about this for a long, long time. “But Kathy Griffin” is about to become the new “But her emails.” It’s a mortal lock, because the right wing has so perfected the art of phony outrage that they can milk a Grade-Z scandal like #Kathghazi for far longer, and to greater effect, than the left can, even the truly horrifying stuff.

I have forgotten literally dozens of awful things that Trump—a man who now wields SUPREME EXECUTIVE POWER over the rest of us—has done in the past month alone. Remember when he leaked submarine locations to a murderous dictator? That had a shelf life of roughly six minutes. But a ketchup-smeared non-joke shouted from an empty corner by Kathy Griffin? This’ll be strung out until the heat death of the galaxy. For all of Trump's sputtering ineptitude, he’s canny enough to draw out his public grievances and make his enemies his supporters’ enemies as well. Witness his irritable bowel session tweet of the morning, covfefe aside:

Do I even need to point out that Trump once suggested that “Second Amendment people” take action against Hillary Clinton, or the countless times President Obama was burned/hung/slashed in effigy by his naysayers? Of course not. Griffin is guilty of being tasteless, but her biggest crime was shoveling an extra heaping of coal into the Right Wing Bullshit Furnace, allowing everyone from Paul Ryan on down to the sweatiest men's rights activists to focus national conversation with atom-level precision on THIS transgression while Trump sets the rest of the world on fire. We’ll hear about the hypocrisy of the “so-called tolerant left” for at least the next 48 hours, and I’m already shaking my head over it.

"Trump and his ilk are far better at making things into A Thing than you or I ever will be, even if those things are blatantly untrue."

Trump and his ilk are far better at making things into A Thing than you or I ever will be, even if those things are blatantly untrue (see: Rich, Seth). Kathy Griffin’s stunt was stupid and inconsequential, and the only real damage it will cause will come from the fact that Griffin unwittingly tossed a life raft to an administration that was drowning and DYING to latch onto whatever piddly gibberish it could to redirect scrutiny. And that life raft has proven effective despite being made of wet cardboard. You got liberal MSNBC tossing up a GRIFFIN BACKLASH chyron this morning, and you got respectable liberals compelled to denounce Griffin online just to show how “fair” and “reasonable” they are. It's enraging how easily Trump can make himself the MacGyver of chicken shit.

This is the hell we’ve been stuck in for nearly two years now, and it doesn’t promise to get better when joints like Fox and Breitbart will use any flotsam they catch to keep the Alternate Reality pond freshly stocked. Every evil act must be countered with a "The other side does it worse!" take now. That’s how you end up with a sitting president getting into Twitter feuds with his spiritual D-list equals, and that is how you end up with phony outrage being a more powerful weapon of communication than the real thing.

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